Month: December 2012

The US government has killed 223 people in Yemen in more than 40 drone strikes in 2012, according to estimates from the Long War Journal.

The Long War Journal is a project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think-tank in Washington, DC that has been shown to systematically underestimate information about the drone war.

A new study from Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute finds that the number of Pakistani civilians killed in drone strikes are “significantly and consistently underestimated” by tracking organizations which are trying to take the place of government estimates on casualties, which the Obama administration won’t comment on because the drone war is technically secret.

The study “warns that low civilian casualty estimates may provide false assurance to the public and policymakers that drone strikes do not harm civilians.” Many low-ball estimates – like those from Long War Journal and New America Foundation – are due to reliance on news reports, which “suffer from common flaws” like trusting “anonymous Pakistani government officials or unnamed witnesses for the claim that ‘militants’ – rather than civilians – were killed.”

But even if we take this probably low-ball estimate as a decent enough approximation of the truth, there is a huge problem in estimating how many of the 223 killed were civilians. The Long War Journal says that 19 percent were civilians.

But  according to the New York Times, the Obama administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

In addition, as The Washington Post reported last week, the Yemeni government as a policy tries to conceal when US drones kill civilians, instead automatically and systematically describing the victims as al-Qaeda militants, regardless of the truth.

“Forget,” Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations sarcastically implores, “that most of the 223 people killed by US airpower in Yemen are not ‘the most senior and most dangerous AQAP terrorists,’ but actually primarily engaged in a domestic insurgency.”

The US is taking out the domestic enemies of the Yemeni government – not individuals engaged in direct attacks on the United States.

“I’m particularly worried that the US drones in Yemen are being used to settle long-standing scores on the ground,” writes Yemen scholar Gregory D. Johnsen.

The US has bombed Yemen at least 42 times in 2012, up from an estimated 10 times in 2011. This, unsurprisingly, has prompted anger among the local populations and has coincided with a marked increase in the estimated number of al-Qaeda militants in Yemen.

“Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,” a Yemeni villager named Mohammed told the Post. “If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.”

A Chinese think-tank (via Zero Hedge) has predicted that military conflict between China and Japan is inevitable now, thanks in part to US meddling in the Asia-Pacific region.

With the rise of China as Asia’s leading economic power, a Chinese government think tank says the nation’s conflict with Japan over the Senkaku Islands is inevitable at a time when its bilateral relations are changing as a consequence.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) also said in its annual report that the two countries’ relationship will enter into a highly unstable period.

While thinking that the conflict over the islands could be prolonged, China is now paying attention to what action the new Japanese government, headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, will take.

The “report on the development of the Asia-Pacific region” points out that China’s rapid development is raising anxieties in surrounding nations, forcing them into taking precautions and requiring them to accept the “readjustment” of the power balance.

As for the Senkaku Islands, the report explained that Japan’s right-wing groups, which have gained strength through the country’s two decades of a sluggish economy called “the lost 20 years,” regarded U.S. policy of “pivoting to Asia” as the best opportunity to nationalize the islands. In September, Japan purchased three of the five Senkaku Islands, called the Diaoyu Islands in China, from a private landowner.

…“Japan’s nationalization of the Diaoyu Islands destroyed the framework for keeping a balance, which means ‘shelving a conflict,’ ” a Chinese diplomatic source said.

Aggressive US meddling in the region has long been predicted to have ugly consequences, like bolstering hard-line nationalistic politicians on all sides. “Signs of a potential harsh reaction are already detectable,” a recent CSIS report said. “The US Asia pivot has triggered an outpouring of anti-American sentiment in China that will increase pressure on China’s incoming leadership to stand up to the United States. Nationalistic voices are calling for military countermeasures to the bolstering of America’s military posture in the region and the new US defense strategic guidelines.”

The US role in this and various other Asian territorial disputes is not one of a neutral player trying to avoid escalation. Rather, the US has pursued an aggressive posture of expanding military assets in the region and teaming up with all of China’s neighboring rivals to side with them on territorial issues in a nationalistic scheme to block China’s rise as a world power.

A veteran Chinese diplomat warned back in October that the US is using Japan as a strategic tool in its military surge in Asia-Pacific aimed at containing China and is heightening tensions between China and Japan. Chen Jia,  who served as an under secretary general of the United Nations and as China’s ambassador to Japan, accused the US of encouraging a militaristic response by Japan. “The US is urging Japan to play a greater role in the region in security terms, not just in economic terms,” he said.

Underlying the dispute are two key factors: (1) Washington has reiterated its commitment to its mutual defense treaty with Japan, insisting that it will become involved militarily in the event of an outbreak of conflict; (2) Washington sees China as a rising power and increasing regional influence and is willing to crush that ascent to maintain its own global dominance.

Technocrats in Washington like to call all this “maintaining stability.” As is often the case, the reality on the ground is the polar opposite of the term used to described it. But Washington isn’t about to have it’s power undermined, is it?

The state structures built in Iraq by the US military occupation are now the depraved tools of repression. First among these tools is the US-trained and equipped Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF). By the time Washington was preparing to draw down forces in Iraq, writes Robert Tollast in The National Interest, “elements of ISOF were already being used as a private army by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.”

And now, with Maliki having secured essentially dictatorial power in Iraq since the US withdrawal, not only is the continuing US support and training for Maliki’s private army of sectarian thugs an essential tool in terrorizing innocent Iraqis, but it is bolstering al-Qaeda-linked groups and stoking sectarian tensions that could lead to civil war.

“Blame here can only go to Maliki,” writes Tollast, who “controls ISOF through the Counterterrorism Bureau, which has proved a useful tool for crushing dissent” and has been “implicated in the intimidation, arrest and even murder of Sunni politicians and opposition figures.”

The Obama administration has kept largely quiet about Maliki’s behavior, aside from about $2 billion in annual aid and tens of billions in military assistance. While this keeps the halls of power in Washington and the oil corporations happy, even the best case scenarios are damning, for Iraqi citizens as well as the geopolitics of the region.

According to Tollast, the strength of al-Qaeda in Iraq has doubled over the past year. Instead of carrying counter-terrorism – “essentially the art of increasing political legitimacy, isolating terrorists from their support base and then eliminating them” – Maliki has been using his security forces in a way that undermines their political legitimacy and reinforces their support base. And as far as civil war goes: angered Kurds and Sunnis say their disenfranchisement has never been greater. This increases the chances more Iraqis will join the latent insurgency still underway there.

Lately, America really seems to have a knack for indirectly strengthening the terrorist groups they claim to fight against. And in their effort to continue propping up dictatorships throughout the Middle East, Washington is sowing deep resentment among the local populations, which ultimately feeds instability. And in the age of Arab uprisings against US-backed totalitarianism, Washington is plain old stupid to keep it up.

“We have to produce security, not consume security.”

It’s a statement beautiful in its simplicity, and straightforwardness. Security is desirable – we all want to be secure, let us produce some security.

In context it is also a statement horrifying in its misguidedness, because Kosovo MP Rexhep Selimi, the source of the quote, used it as an argument for creating a military and joining NATO.

This is the ultimate over-simplification of what “security” really is and where it comes from. The assumption from this statement is that the deployment of troops from abroad is “security” being consumed, and creating another army is “security” being produced, to be consumed elsewhere.

This is of course readily disproven. Iraq’s “security” demonstrably and dramatically fell with the invasion of the “coalition of the willing” despite it being, in Selimist terms, an import of huge amounts of consumable security. Afghanistan, likewise, got less and less security throughout the past decade as the Bush and Obama Administrations added troops.

On the other hand, citizens of several nations with marginal militaries enjoy dramatically better security than in nations like North Korea or Myanmar, where the military is a huge portion of the economy and massive power over day-to-day life.

The deployment of thousands of NATO troops to attack the ethnic Serbs in the north of Kosovo is not “consuming security,” and creating a proper Kosovar Albanian army to launch those attacks themselves isn’t “producing security” either. Rather NATO is an importer of militarism into Kosovo, and Selimi is hoping to turn the nation into a net exporter of NATO’s favorite commodity, war. Needless to say, the US seems supportive of the idea, as indeed they always are when other nations begin dumping money into the never-ending sinkhole that is a military. Misery, it seems, truly does love company.